Homeowner Resources

This section contains documents of particular interest to homeowners. Many of these articles describe case studies from BSC’s work with Building America, a research program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to design and construct quality homes that use less energy without costing more to build. More information is available from the U.S. Department of Energy's website.

For assistance with some of the technical terms you may encounter, please see the BSC Glossary. Our Information Sheets are also a great resource for building technical knowledge.

Document Type

After a high performance home has been designed, constructed, and commissioned, what ensures that the home is actually operated at peak performance? It takes just 24 easy-reading pages for the homeowner to learn just how simple it is to achieve the full benefits of these particular energy-efficient, comfortable, healthy, and durable homes.

How you live in your home and how you clean and maintain your home affect the quality of air in your home. Keeping your home clean and dry makes it comfortable and healthy for you and unfriendly and unwelcoming to pests.

This pamphlet is designed for members of the residential construction and remodeling industries, as well as owners and managers who work in affordable housing. It presents building guidance for both new construction and rehabilitation, as well as practices that can be used by property maintenance personnel.

An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Perhaps it was the drug culture of the 60’s that turned brains into coleslaw but it is hard to understand the lunatic practice of placing a layer of sand over the top of a plastic ground cover under a concrete slab in California.

An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal.
Think of the good old days—the Civil War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII—crawlspaces were uninsulated. They were ventilated and they didn’t have ground covers—and they didn’t have problems. Why?

This article was first published in "Perspectives," Volume 17, Number 1. Spring 2009. The on-going consumption of energy to operate, condition, and light a building, as well as the energy embodied in on-going maintenance is the largest single source of environmental damage and resource consumption due to buildings. Reducing the operational energy use and increasing durability should be the prime concerns of architects who wish to design and building “green” buildings.

Existing homes present an incredible variety of conditions. The variations of building techniques over time and across different regions combined with the inherent individuality among builders lends to a mind-boggling variety of configurations in existing housing stock. Rather than try to encompass all of the possible solutions responding to each of various existing conditions, this guide details a limited number of options for deep energy retrofit of common configurations found in wood framed New England homes. Through its experience in guiding high performance retrofit projects, BSC has found the solutions in this guide to be applicable to the vast majority of circumstances. Some retrofit projects will require solutions that are not described in this guide.